Cyclohexanone and cyclohexanol, as important industrial chemicals, are widely used in the fields of fiber, synthetic rubber, industrial paint, medicine, pesticide, organic solvent and so on. As the rapid development of polyamide industry, the global quantity demanded for cyclohexanone and cyclohexanol, which serve as intermediates to produce Nylon 6 and Nylon 66, is greater than 2 million Tons.
Regarding the demand above, the skilled persons are devoted to developing processes of producing cyclohexanone (cyclohexanol) with high efficiency without pollution. The skilled persons deem that the oxidation of cyclohexane using hydrogen peroxide as an oxidizer and using titanium silicate molecular sieve as a catalyst to prepare cyclohexanone (cyclohexanol) satisfies the requirement of green chemistry and the developing idea of atom economy, and thus is a new green technology with great prospect to produce cyclohexane.
A plurality of factors affect the reaction of oxidizing cyclohexane catalyzed by the titanium silicate molecular sieve, such as the properties of the titanium silicate molecular sieve per se, the properties of the oxidizer hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), the selection of solvent, reaction conditions (e.g. temperature, feeding ratios, reaction pressure and the like) and so on. In order to increase the selectivity to cyclohexanone in the cyclohexane oxidation process, the skilled persons focus mainly on developing more effective titanium silicate molecular sieve catalyst, and optimizing the reaction conditions in the process to achieve the target above.
Although there are currently kinds of research on the reaction of oxidizing cyclohexane catalyzed by titanium silicate molecular sieve, most of them are restricted in laboratories, but are unavailable for a continuously industrial production. The defects of the existing processes lie in either the picky requirement on the devices or the high energy consumption, low yield and the like.
Therefore, how to develop a process for the reaction of oxidizing cyclohexane catalyzed by titanium silicate molecular sieve useful for commercially continuous production represents the main direction to which the research on the oxidation reaction of cyclohexane with a titanium silicate molecular sieve/H2O2 system is focused.